The roles and perspectives of five kinds of stakeholders are discussed and debated: the end user; the device and hardware manufacturers; the traditional media houses; the Internet giants and the telecom operators. All are very important and play essential parts in the mobile/Internet eco-system. The balance between them has shifted over time and will continue to do so. The telecom operators seem to be the most criticised and questioned. Is this unfair or have they earned it?

Historically the telecom operators have been enormously successful offering high quality global fixed line telecom services. Next in line was mobile telephony developed in cooperation between Nordic operators, such as Telia and Sonera, today merged into TeliaSonera, and hardware suppliers such as Ericsson and Nokia. The success of the operators has been based on a network centric business model. Even with many attempts to expand into new adjacent areas almost all of the profits still come from the original core of the business. Moving into new areas has shown to be difficult. This is probably due to limited knowledge and experience, cultural differences and conflicting business strategies. Focus has been on increasing traffic and not end user value, a strategy which now even may show quite dangerous risking ending up in a network apocalypse scenario. Should then the operators avoid new tempting areas and just stick to what they clearly understand, running networks and offer access?

The operators struggle with the dilemma of finding new revenue sources at the same time as they desperately defend the existing cash cows. The main difficulty lies within that the old network business is local/national and telecom centric and most new business is global and based on IP/Internet logic. You can’t move into the new business without starting competing with the old thinking. Moving from a fully controlled stove pipe environment to a horizontally layered business structure with fierce competition on each layer may be an almost impossible equation.

What we see over and over again are attempts to move into new value added services without understanding what it takes to become successful. The new services most often need to be competitive by their own on a regional or global scale utilising significant scale advantages. Instead the new business is subsidised by the old until some brave young business controller analyse the case, showing that the new business is not competitive, have a far too high cost level and do more harm than good.

We have entered into a situation of access independent services also for the mobile. As outlined in a recent report by Gartner the mobile will already in 3 years be set to overtake the PC as the most common web browsing device. Internet will finally be available for all of humanity through Internet enabled mobiles, especially important to developing countries. The operators are of course instrumental to make this happen. We need well run high quality and efficient networks. There is also a number of enabling functionalities, such as efficient payment solutions, location data, device management etc. that the operators may offer partners. However, there are still some very basic elements related to cost control that urgently need to be in place, the two most important being: affordable flat rates and reasonable and transparent data roaming charges.

There is also a lot of talk about utilising all the data the operators have about usage and the end user. However, this data is hard to get out of the systems and is rather technical in nature and not originally defined for marketing purposes. It’s time to realise that the huge amounts of detailed data hidden in the operator’s systems is rather useless. We need specific data depending on business logic, that can be used for marketing purposes, and that is automatically generated and monitored without first involving the technical staff for weeks.

The operators need to shift focus from traffic maximisation to end user and partner value creation. They also need to support device and operator independent initiatives, such as UMIs, as all will be winners when penetration of Internet access through the mobile increases. Differentiation of the access offering through exclusive value added services and content is a very costly and is not sustainable. Stop doing costly experiments in attempts to find new revenues sources in business areas you don’t understand. There’s no reason why being a bit pipe provider should not be a profitable business even in the future, except for if the regulator mess things up completely. Please realise that moving into an IP environment gives access independent services, focus on making data charges understandable and affordable and incentivise all to maximise the value to traffic ratio.

UMI – Universal Mobile Interface

We are in very interesting times in the evolution of the mobile phone. The mobile phone has changed all our lives substantially with voice and messaging services but are we now seeing the next wave making the mobile essential for also other services?
For long the mobile has been predicted to become much more of a multimedia device. This has not really happened and the disappointments have been many. Some claim that the barriers are now gone unleashing the true potential of mobile internet services.
Is this really the case, what is really needed and what development can be expected?
This blog will discuss these issues in general and the concept of the Universal Mobile Interface, UMI, in particular.